What America Is Doing About the Homeless

There are many things in life that can strike one when they least expect it. The situation could either be winning the lotto or something bad like catching a fatal sickness, but no matter what it is, both will have a huge effect on ones life. Homelessness can happen to anyone at any given moment in their life for over a hundred different reasons. It does not even have to be their fault. For this reason exactly is why Americans should consider this a major crisis today. The amount of people becoming homeless in America is constantly growing. Although some people can get out of being homeless pretty quickly, more and more people are becoming homeless every day, and the more people that become homeless, the more people crowd the streets we live on. There is many different views on where these people should live such as on the street or in permanent housing fund by the government. The only thing that makes sense is to help them by providing shelter. This is proven by psychological facts and also tied with statistical data. No matter what the economy is like, poverty will always been there, the only ting we can do about it is make it easier.

New York City has an overwhelming amount of homeless people on the streets is very obvious. People always wondered how and why these people become this way and why it seems like nothing is being done to change it. Some think that homeless people are just people who lost their jobs and are too lazy to get back into the workforce, but research has shown that that is not the case. The statistics of homelessness in America is shocking considering that the country is one that is more advanced, especially from the technological standpoint, perhaps far more than most other countries of the world.

Homeless can be defined as “The lack of a permanent, safe and affordable night-time residence.” (Homelessness in America - Anonymous) People becoming homeless is not anything new to the world, and it did not exactly start at a specific time period either. During the 1990’s, when the United States economy was flourishing, homelessness was still a huge problem. Even during times like those, the amount of homeless people stayed pretty high. Data taken by the Homelessness in America organization in 2004 shows about thirty 6.6 million people in the United States had an income below the federal poverty edge (Homelessness in America website). That is 12.6 percent of the U.S. population and that’s only people who are poor and not being helped by government housing or food stamp programs. If government helped people were included, another 7.5 million more could be categorized as being poor. If one was to count all of the money all of these people would need to move their household incomes above the U.S. poverty levels, it would be in the ball park of about one hundred and 5.6 billion dollars and the country is not about to spend that much on its poor. Although this is true, people are still trying to help this problem shrink as much as possible.

Even though some organizations say they know exactly how many people are homeless in America, there is really no way to exactly know for sure. A book written Diana Kendall called, Social Problems in a Diverse Society, Diana says that the actual amount of homeless people is unknown but they she thinks it is between 500,000 and the 3.5 million mark. The reason she says it is very difficult to count the exact number of homeless people is because most of them try extremely hard to stay away from interviews with census takers and social scientists. But over the years, the U.S. Conference Of Mayors performs a survey every year on urban homelessness and by this they are able to calculate the percentage of races that are homeless. The survey says African Americans make up most of the homeless population with forty two percent of it, white people make up thirty nine percent, Latinas/os make up thirteen percent, Native Americans are four percent, and Asian...

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